A fairly long list of projects will take part in this year's Google Summer of Code, the fifth since 2005. Students will be working in grand style to improve products from these popular open source projects.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has turned into a favorite event for the open source community. In it, student developers at open source projects apply themselves to certain tasks and Google provides them stipends in exchange. Students are paired with mentors from the participating projects. Meanwhile the list of accepted GSoC students for 2009 has been published and we'll take a quick look at some of the successful candidates. As an aside, the U.S. ranks first in accepted applicants, followed by India, Germany, Canada and Brazil.

The supported projects include FFmpeg, where nine students will work on improving the multimedia backend library used by MPlayer, VLC and others. They'll enhance the software, among other things, by developing RTMP support for Flash streaming, an S/PDIF muxer and an MPEG-4 ALS decoder. They also plan to implement a new seeking API in libavformat.

Eleven accepted Debian students will enhance the Debian distro with new features. Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte wants to introduce history tracking into Aptitude Package Management, while Stephan Peijnik will work on a distribution-independent update-manager. Another student wants to allow Debian to release its own signed, trusted AMI images for Amazon EC2 and other clouds.

The Scribus desktop publishing team of four at SoC 2009 intends to improve PDF export and implement XPS support in Scribus. Among them also, Meetanshu Gupta will reimplement the Search and Replace algorithm to increase text manipulation efficiency.

KDE is also again on board for this year. Here a presumable record number of 38 developers supported by Google will work on a respective number of tasks. These include improvements to the Plasma media center components and plasmoids (possibly a new widget explorer) and George Kiagiadakis's reviving KCall for KDE's own VoIP client. Constantin Berzan will ensure that Akonadi will get a global outbox under Thomas McGuire's mentorship. Lukas Tvrdy will give Krita a 3D brush and Dmitry Kazakov will provide it with a new tile and mipmapping engine. Two students will work on Kopete to turn a chat window into a library and improve MSN support. Vyacheslav Tokarev will cobble a WYSIWYG editor together for KHTML under Maksim Orlovich's mentorship.

A complete list of the supported projects is here. A click on each project shows details of the accepted work to be done.